Data

I got this data from a altruistic user on Kaggle. (https://www.kaggle.com/lazyjustin/pubgplayerstats) It gives the details for 65 million kills in the popular online battle royale game Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds (pubg). I ingested all of the data into a SQL Server database and ran the analysis in RStudio. This page shows the results of some of my exploration into this data.

Vehicle deaths

Here are all of the kills that were classified as “Hit by car” for 1 million PUBG matches on Miramar. I am not sure why there are points in the water (notice the bottom right). How can you get hit by a car when you’re 50 meters from the shore?

Punch deaths

Take a look at all the “Punch” deaths. They seem to form a ring around the map. I think this shows where people get automatically dumped out of the airplane when they’re AFK. Not sure how else to explain it.

Crossbow deaths

The crossbow is not a very popular weapon. Let’s see where the crossbow deaths happen. They seem to be clustered mostly around the “towns” on the map and not much in the open areas.

SCAR-L deaths

The SCAR-L is a popular rifle. Notice how much more widely used it is than the crossbow. If I used the same settings as the previous graphs, it would look like green blob. I had to reduce the point opacity from 28 to 4. That’s 1/7(!) of the previous graphs.

Cause of death over time

The gif below shows the odds of dying to a particular method over the course of a match. The index in the upper left goes from 0 to 200. It doesn’t correspond to minutes, it’s just an arbitrary way to keep track of time. Keep an eye on the Bluezone to get an idea of how much time has passed.


 

I think its interesting to see how falling and punching are common ways to die at the beginning of a match. Pistols are also common, but they quickly fall out of favor as players find the rifles. AKM and M16 are popular for a while, but they seem to get replaced (or killed off) by SCAR-L and M4 by the middle of the first Bluezone. The M4 looks like the clear favorite in the end game. I don’t know what “Down and out” means, but it kills a lot of players throughout the game.